How to Repair America’s Broken Democracy

introducing Skeptics New Edition our mind's ciding decision we've got the answers to your burning questions unlocking the secrets decoding the missions created by AI this jingle is divide catching and will blow your mind artificial intelligence the topics are new explore the deps of of what it can do get your Cofe now it's ready to unfold order a [Music] shop hi everyone it's Michael Shermer before I introduce today's guest I want to tell you about our sponsor of this episode it's brilliant brilliant is an app you just put you just download on your phone tap it open it up and you can take different different kinds of courses tutorials lessons and so forth it's an online learning platform that allows you to learn about pretty much anything and everything of importance in science in technology and guess what they have a course on how llms work you know what llms are large language models chat GPT how does this work anyway I have no clue so I start the lesson I just tap start lesson it opens right up to me uh for me and allows me to do seven different lessons on how it works including typing right in there and hitting submit to see what um chat GPT produces for me anyway that's the kind of thing you could do if you want to learn how llms work in seven easy lessons that takes all of like 10 minutes I love teaching myself I'm an autodidact by reading and learning online different new topics check it out brilliant they're a great company brilliant.org and if you go to brilliant.org skeptic you get a free 30-day trial and get 20% off your annual subscription all right check it out thanks for listening here's our podcast all right my guest today is Maxwell L Sterns is who is the Venable majer and Howard professor of law at the University of Maryland Harry School of Law he's authored dozens of articles in several books on the Constitution the Supreme Court and the economic analysis of law his new book is here it is I have it on PDF form you can see it there it's called parliamentary America the least radical means of radically repairing our broken democracy Max thanks for coming on the show to talk to me well thank you so much for having me and I can I can show you what the actual book looks like yeah please so your so your readers will be able to will be able to see it yeah no I appreciate that I didn't get my physical copy in the mail it'll probably come as soon as done here we'll work on that I'll get that fixed no it's all good I I read it in PDF form so it's well what good timing I mean everybody is talking about uh of course the 2024 election everybody's worried between you know Trump and and Biden neither one of it would be most people's preferred candidate but what are the Alternatives and you know there's quite a few books about broken democracy or the end of democracy around the world and so on so let's just start there what uh what's the problem that needs to be solved the problem that needs to be solved is our system of creating the government our system of two-party presidentialism and we've put up with it for a really long time we've put up with it for going on quarter of Millennium but in the information age it has encountered fundamental problems that have created the risk of autocracy or collapse that have confronted other democracies as well and I decided to write this book because it occurred to me that people weren't properly diagnosing the problem they saw symptoms of democratic failure people were beginning to propose any number of solutions um including term limits and rank Choice voting and uh and and out llarge multi-member districts bypassing the Electoral College in various ways for the national po vote and I looked at all these and realized that they either would not solve the Constitutional crisis that we facing they could not be enacted or both and I realized that there was a way out of the crisis and that it required us to really rethink the way we do democracy and so that's the mission of the book is to educate people um in a way that hopefully is accessible and even fun um by taking folks on a on a virtual world tour across seven countries to show how other democracies work and how we can make the best features of better systems our own and and emerge a thriving uh multi-party democracy yeah just pulling something off the headlines I see this morning um Alise stefanic has said uh that she would not have done what Mike Pence did namely count the Electoral College votes uh I don't know if she really believes that or she's just uh uh trying out for VP for Trump and wants to say whatever he wants to hear but that would be an example of constitutional law requires you do X and if you and if somebody refuses had Mike Pence refused to do it that would have been a kind of Crisis you're talking about well I mean I actually think we're in the midst of a constitutional crisis I think I think a lot of people imagine that a constitutional crisis emerges in some kind of a spectacular fashion like an event yeah and I think that's a mistake I I I I think that um the ziblat litzky book how democracies die nicely explains that actually the demise of democracies historically across the globe has resulted from the steady degradation of long-standing democratic norms and it can last for decades it can take a very long time it's not an event it is a process and we are in that process I think we are in the crisis it's not as if we're waiting for the crisis we're in the crisis when the inflection point will be at which we will inevitably for be forced to Institute some fundamental change that's hard to predict but there's no doubt in my mind that we are at the level of dysfunction um that corresponds to a democratic crisis that we are living it and we've been living it for some time it's not something that's immediate this is something that we've been living with um for you know easily going on a decade at this point you saw something like the events of January 6 that's not the crisis that's the result of this crisis you're talking about I think that's right in other words that could have been an inflection point if Mike Pence had heeded what Donald Trump wanted him to do that may have triggered the inflection point or it could have actually collapsed our democracy but I don't think that the um the way to describe it is that that event was the crisis I think you've got it exactly right that event was symptomatic IC of a longer standing crisis our nation is facing and and one of the main points that I wrote the book was to explain that this very much has to do with institutional features that provide the foundation for our faing democracy and we have to confront that reality we have to get past the idea that we have the perfect system this notion of American exceptionalism that somehow a group of people meeting in Philadelphia a quarter of a quarter of a millennium ago um forever came up with a solution as to how to do democracy and that we have nothing to learn since then I think that's profoundly mistaken and we have to get past that and be willing to open our eyes and learn from the experiences of other nations around the globe that have either succeeded or failed in facing down their own threats to democracy yeah I I'm a big fan of the founders I've read the The Federalist Papers and and all those documents you know surrounding it and it is impressive what they were able to do but they're not Gods you know they didn't prly see Twitter on the rise and social media as a device of force so how could they no nobody could so the approach you take that I like is uh what's called the comparative method you know we can't run controlled you know gold standard controlled experiments where we have one country try one thing and another country try another thing and see what the results are but that does happen anyway naturally so let's look around and see what has actually happened and then compare and which is what you've done here but before we get into that that's the second part of your book um just walk us to give us a basic Civics lessons for those of us who forget since high school uh you know how the government is supposed to work the checks and balances what the founders intended when they set it up like that and why it turned out a little bit differently than maybe their intentions so the way that I the way that I like to explain it to my own students is the framers imagine that they create something we might think of as a rock paper scissors Constitution so the the idea is that the president can veto legislation that comes from Congress so the president beats Congress the Supreme Court can strike down laws that the president likes or executive orders that the president issues if they violate the constitution so the Supreme Court beats the president the president beats Congress so you think that the Supreme Court will therefore beat Congress but but of course Congress can overturn um statutory rulings with ordinary legislation it can Institute amending processes to overturn constitutional rulings and so we have this kind of loop right where the where the Supreme Court beats the president the president beats Congress Congress beats the Supreme Court but then there's another layer which we can call the the scissors paper rock Constitution Congress can override a presidential veto the Supreme Court can strike down laws that are unconstitutional so the Supreme Court beats Congress Congress beats the president but actually the President also gets to appoint justices so it moves in both directions and what the framers thought was that this set of NeverEnding institutional rivalries where each branch of government could defeat another Branch or be defeated by another Branch meant that we would forever control and break what they called the violence of factions you could think of that as precursors to political parties and when you add on top of that federalism sort of the layered tensions and jealousies based on geography we would really break down that that dangerous factional violence the problem is although they had this Vision I sometimes call it the unicycle Constitution because it kind of Cycles forward or backward um although they had this Vision they instituted a set of structures that fundamentally thwarted that Vision by having direct uh directly chosen president processed through the Electoral College we are divided into teams because each side recognizes that the winning Strat means fracturing the opposition but keeping your team United and because that's Mutual we end up with two teams and actually if you go back even as early as George Washington's um farewell address which is pretty early in our history you see that he lamented the growing partisanship and it seemed to be the case even then that these rival games among the branches of government or at the level of federalism weren't working out as the framers intended um but this all became acute when our 18th century Constitution Hit Upon 21st century Information Age Technologies for very particular reasons that we can talk about so we were able to tolerate this for a good long time but we do have to recognize that we tolerated it for a good long time it's not as if it was necessarily the best way to do business as a democracy and in fact if you think about it the United States has exported democracy for very long time but never successfully our form of democracy and there's a very good reason for that so there's a tension built into our system between what the framers thought they were doing and what they actually did right so the election of 1800 was pretty volatile of course there's no social media but there was pamphleteering and newspapers were quite rampant people literacy was quite high and people got their information relatively rapidly so by the social media what's the problem it's the speed with which it it spreads or the the polarization of of of people so there sort of two elements to it and they're synergistic they kind they kind of bring out each other's worst qualities right so so so part of it social media and part of it is hyper partisan gerrymandering and and they're both a kind of gerrymander so um let me just briefly talk about the former and then and then connect it to social media so as a result of hyper partisan gerrymandering district lines that are drawn in ways that actually enhance the voting strength of the state um legislative party that's in power to give it more seats for example in State Legislative assemblies but also in Congress we end up with a system in which members of the House of Representatives are choosing their electorate they're choosing their voters not the other way around but also in the social media age as a result of the algorithms that are designed to keep us wedded to the page and engaged with our feeds news media are choosing their readers not the other way around we've gone well past the point at which there are common sources of information upon which we all rely and we have very large numbers of Voters May correlate with age younger voters may be more susceptible to the influence of the structure of social media news feeds although to be honest I know plenty of older people that are too and what happens is we have this Dynamic feed back loop from media from social media to to voter to politician to social media that moves the modes or the centers of our two political parties the Democratic and Republican parties increasingly far apart and and that's not an impression that's actually demonstrated by data if you look at the Pew Research Center from the early 1990s until now what you see is that at one point you had these kind of distributions for each Camp they overlap fairly considerably and over those decades in the information age they've moved further and further apart and so now it's no longer the case that we're willing to say things like well somebody on the side has looked at the same data I have in good faith and they've achieved a different resolution they've drawn different implications from that data than I have let's have a conversation now it must be the case that people on the other side whichever side you're on they must either lack basic intelligence or somehow be evil and this has created profound dysfunction both societally in the way we interact with each other which is deeply painful and problematic but also the growing Divergence between the political parties at every step has become increasingly problematic leading to just a fundamental governmental dysfunction I think if I recall you have some graphs in the book I think they were in the PDF showing that divisive maybe you could find that while I'm talking for a second let me try to find it so you're talking about the Pew graphic I'm happy so I mean if I recall it happy to try to pull that up actually I I I managed to open to the page oh there go yeah okay there it is so that that is actually from the pure that's not something that we created for the book or that I created for the book that is from the Pew Research Center now it shows um it shows if I 1994 to 2017 but if you think about it 2017 um I'm going to put it down but I think people have had a chance to see that but if you think about it 2017 It's relatively early in the Trump area there's very little question that those modes have if anything grown substantially further apart in the intervening in the intervening years you know there was a time when the parties had such considerable overlap that if you go back to the 50s it's quite striking the American Political Science Association published a study of the political parties in the 19 early 19 1950s and the major criticism is just unimaginable by modern lights they said the big difference the the big problem with our two- party system is the parties don't give meaningful choices to the electorate but if you think about it you go back to the 1952 election both the Democrats and the Republicans quoted the exact same candidate to head their ticket Dwight David Eisenhower and in the same period of Time 5 years later this economist named Anthony DS publishes a book called an economic theory of democracy and it popularizes an intuition that we all have about our politics that isn't correct but it's just common which is we can we can Define our politics as liberal to conservative on one line and imagine that if all people care about is policy and if all the politicians care about is winning they'll Converge on the center and that wasn't really entirely that wasn't really entirely um um Downs his point but it is a conception that we all have it just isn't actually the way that our politics works because our politics implicates more than one dimension and for very particular reasons we're seeing a growing Divergence not a convergence yeah uh keeping along the lines of the Civic lesson so every state gets two senators so that no state dominates another state but on the other hand it's not fair that little island has the same representation as big old California where I'm at so then that's based on population in the House of Representatives okay what's wrong with that system well so that's an interesting you know it it's it's very striking if you look at Wyoming Wyoming is the most extreme case right a Wyoming voter has 67 times the voting strength as compared with the California voter if you actually compare the populations um of those of those two countries and you look at the fact that why gets two senators just like California and in fact what's particularly interesting is that the lowest population 21 states their population combined equals California so 21 states have 42 Senators California still gets two even though the populations are the same um I do not propose reapportioning the Senate not because I oppose reapportioning the Senate I would say the Senate is the single most anti-democratic body in any Nation claiming to be a democracy in the world but I also believe that it's not necessary to reapportion the Senate to solve the fundamental problem of the Constitutional crisis that we're facing the subtitle of my book and I'll put it up again is the least radical means of radically repairing our broken democracy so what I'm trying to do is be surgical here I'm trying to say we have a fun fundamental problem with the two- party system in which the two parties are moving increasingly far apart one of those is moving toward nationalism in a deeply profound way it's affecting the other party in ways that leave moderates in both parties feeling disenfranchised in an earlier period of Elite control those who would have been tea party and that sort of the early precursor to Maga those who were strong progressives they felt disenfranchised and the problem is that we failed to give our voters genuinely meaningful choices by limiting their choices to two and by requiring them every four years to choose the lesser of two evils and what I what I refer to in the book as the third party dilemma is this idea that every four years voters are told you have to vote for the lesser of two evils because if you don't you run the risk of favoring the major Party candidate that actually you find more disturbing as between the two and that's going to be full force in election 2024 which inevitably seems like it's Joe Biden versus Donald Trump despite the fact that I at last poll that I saw 63% of American voters which neither one of them were running and so we we have this problem in which we don't give voters meaningful choices and the question then becomes how do we give voters meaningful choices and in the book based on surveying several democracies around the globe England France Germany Israel Taiwan um Venezuela and Brazil but picking up lessons from other countries along the way I demonstrate that there are better ways we can do democracy and two of the critical elements are having proportional representation and having parliamentary selection of the head of government but that's a first step because they're a deeply problematic parliamentary system just as there are deeply problematic presidential systems so we have to be a little more granular in our thinking and we have to look closely at how these different systems work because what I'm proposing is a particular form of parliamentary governance that achieves what I refer to as the Goldilocks principle because it turns out that the fundamental threat to democratic governance is having either too few parties like us like the UK think of brexit or having too many parties think Italy for example think Brazil for example problems in Israel for example and what you want to do is Achieve what political scientists recognize as a sweet spot of typically between four and eight parties not too many not too few like Goldilocks and there is a way to do it and political scientists agree that there's that there's a particular system that achieves this better than other systems and I've demonstrated we could make that kind of a system system our own this is a system that would work particularly well in the United States it would solve the crisis and it can be enacted okay last civics lesson uh question on the Electoral College what do we need that for what's the justification it sure seems unfair every time the the uh the Electoral College nominates or gets gives us a president who didn't get the popular vote majority it just seems unfair what what's the justification and what would you do about it well so it picks up on the threat of your last question and I'll just I'll just relate them so you asked about the Senate it's egregiously unfair that Wyoming gets two senators California gets two senators of course this was part of the compromise between large states and small states at the time in the framing of the Constitution where the Senate was chosen by state in fact originally state general assemblies chose the senatorial delegation or had the authority to we now do it by popular election thanks to the 17th Amendment although that was a trend line before the amendment Most states were already beginning to do it that way the Electoral College is an extension of that compromise and the idea is that every state um gets a number of votes in the Electoral College equal to the sum of their Senate plus house delegations so the house delegations are based on population the Senate delegations are two per state add them up and it's part of that compromise the purpose of which is historically to give smaller States some additional influence and Authority but the consequence of which actually ends up being kind of the opposite right so if we go back to election 2000 you talked about the fact that we sometimes have what I call upside down elections elections in which the Electoral College outcome is the opposite of the outcome in the popular vote it's happened five times in our history two times fairly recently 2000 between Al Gore and George W bush where Al Gore got more of the popular vote and because of what happened in Florida George W bush wins the election um and of course in 2016 between Hillary Clinton and um Donald Trump where Donald Trump wins The Electoral College despite Hillary Clinton getting three more three million more votes among the popular vote so a lot of people think that's the problem they think the problem with our democracy is the occasional upside down election but it is a symptom of the problem and and and even solving that won't solve our problem of the fundamental threat to our democracy and it could actually exacerbate the problem so there is one good thing we can say about the Electoral College um I analogize it to a concept that criminal lawyers will be familiar with called harmless error right so in criminal trials not every mistake that occurs in the courtroom results in overturning a conviction that may result some you know some results you would have gotten even if the mistake hadn't been made so one thing the Electoral College does is it creates an electoral harmless error so it turns out that in the 2000 election there were five states in which there were alleged electoral improprieties but the only state that mattered was Florida and everybody knew it because whichever way Florida went that that 25 set of votes in the Electoral College is going to tip it either fully in the direction of bush or fully in the direction of Gore all the other states were harmless error so if you think about it if we actually do a national popular vote and there's an effort to do it without an amendment there's actually a coalition of states that are trying to kind of end run um the ordinary you would way you would think of accomplishing this through a pact of sorts um suddenly harmless error disappears and if you imagine that we still have two parties cuz we're still directly electing the president the same incentive that produces two parties remains suddenly votes anywhere in the country that are problematic become fair game it could actually make far worse the partisanship over efforts to suppress voting efforts to challenge voting after the fact efforts to call somebody up to find a few 100,000 votes here or there because suddenly every vote equally matters it actually could make our partisanship more severe if that's imaginable than the severity that we're facing now cuz although it's true that it would be great to fix our upside down elections which my proposals will do that wouldn't exist doing it that way doesn't end our two-party system and that's giving rise to a larger set of pathologies The Upside Down election is just one quirk in our system but it's not the fundamental problem in our system which is two-party presidentialism mhm can you explain um Jerry Mandarin to us again and what the problem with that is yeah so so Jerry Mandarin has a really interesting history going back to a Massachusetts governor whose name was Eldridge Gary so hard G it actually should be Gary mandering but H whatever somebody so he drew up a district that looked like a salamander and somebody uh created a port manw marrying Eldridge Gary's last name Gary and Mander as I said should be Gary Mander but Jerry Mander and everyone around the world World uses the term gerrymander what it really means is drawing district lines in a manner that creates a kind of packing super majorities of folks in the party you don't favor and a spreading of the wealth so you've got smaller margins but more seats in the party that you do and that worked pretty well for Eldridge Gary what's changed um is that we now observe an incredibly Hightech capacity to engage in gerrymandering in ways that profoundly affect representation in state um and in in state legislative bodies in the House of Representatives the the best telling of the story is by David Daly uh former editor of Salon who who um wrote a book called rat eff unceremonious title right uh but it actually is a political science term of art um a dirty d d Dirt Cheap that's what it means and what he what he shows is that after Obama's first election in 2008 Republican operatives figured out that they could for pennies on the dollar throw money at state general assembly elections if they could flip enough of those bodies from Blue to red or purple to Red they could then entrench Republican control across more State legislative bodies and entrench Republican control of those delegations to the house and they thought that the consequence of that was going to be to entrench Republican control for about 20 years they were a little bit ambitious in that regard but not egregiously ambitious and and and and it's played in both directions I mean honestly the Democrats blinked with respect to the strategy that uh is referred to as red map that's the strategy that that David Deli describes but both sides play the game and the Supreme Court which for a long time with Justice Kennedy being the decisive Justice uh until he stepped down had suggested there might be some hypar Jerry mandering so extreme that the court will strike it down uh but as soon as he stepped off the court at the very first opportunity in a case called rucho um the court abandoned that and said they they used a Doctrine with a kind of technical sounding name it is it is um the political question Doctrine they said it is not justiciable not something the courts should be deciding and as a result the Supreme Court has basically greenlighted the ability of State legislative bodies entirely to engage in hyper partisan gerrymandering and so as a consequence of that members of the House of Representatives are choosing their constituents not the other way around in the sense that those districts aren't competitive now that's slightly misstated they're not competitive in the general election they are competitive in the primary cycle But the irony there is that being primaried or threatened to be primaried moves the two modes further apart right because if you're primary because you're a Centrist Republican you're going to be inclined to be closer to the base to avoid being primary if you're primary because you're a Centrist Democrat you're going to try to move closer to the base or you know or you'll give up your seat and so the consequence has been that as a result of our districted elections in the House of Representatives and as a result of this what a when you say primarying do you mean like when Trump denounces somebody who's no longer loyal to him as they're coming up for reelection so uh they they just don't vote them in and the primary and they pick somebody else that's precisely what I'm referring to yeah but but and just to be clear it happens on both sides right I mean one of the things that that that um Alexandria oazo Cortez and the squad um tried to do when they first got in right I mean first of all she unseed Joe pry he was more of a Centrist Democrat um Who had who had served 10 terms but but they they were threatening to primary uh members of the democratic party who were insufficiently Progressive by their lights so it is it is in fact true that Republicans have historically been better at this but it's not as if the Democrats are completely Ungifted in that they haven't tried to do some of the same things and problem with problematic consequences okay parliamentary America what is a parliament and how does that different from what we have and what do we have a constitutional democracy right or constitutional republic well the framers spoke in terms of a republic and and really what they meant by Republic was that we're not a direct democracy we are so large even even back then we were way smaller back then on a population basis but we were spread over a pretty big land mass the idea of having direct democracy as the means of doing democracy wouldn't work given the scope and scale so what they were thinking was if we expand the scope and have a greater group from whom to choose our Representatives will have greater Talent from which to choose and we'll have a more effective government that was very much what uh Madison wrote in the Federalist but the other part of it was that they set up a presidential system and as I say they didn't think they were creating a two-party presidential system they thought they were actually creating a system that would avoid the violence of factions they didn't think there would be parties in the sense that we think of them today but they set up a system that made two parties inevitable and increasingly entrenched over time throughout our history we've had two dominant parties that doesn't mean we've never had third parties and we've had transitional periods where we've gone from one two-party system to another two-party system and when we've had that transition we've had the appearance of more parties but when the dust settles we've always had two dominant parties as a consequence of the way we choose the president and also the fact that our states are geographically defined and our districts at least since the early 1840s were generally geographically defined earlier on we did have some out llarge voting in States there's a complicated history I talk about that in the book um but by large we are choosing our Representatives through geographically defined locations whether it's the house whether it's the Senate whether it's the president which gives rise to a two-party system parliamentary systems sometimes will have some districted representation and the version that I propose actually lets every member of the House and Senate remain an incumbent in the state or District that elected them that's part of the inact ability I believe that this is enactable in large part because unlike the vast majority of proposals which are functionally unemployment acts for members of Congress who you need to get these things enacted mine actually lets them all keep their jobs and there're those are good jobs they like them um but more typically in a parliamentary system you've at least got a you you've got either a uh complete system of proportional representation or a partial system of proportional representation and the head of the government is chosen not by the voters but by a coalition that forms in the legislative body typically the lower chamber some some governments only have one lower some some democracies have only one chamber Israel is an example of that most large democracies have two Chambers just like we do the House of Representatives is our lower chamber the Senate's the upper chamber typically the lower legislative chamber will form a majority Coalition and the head of that Coalition ends up having their person run the government what I'm proposing is a system that blends districted representation with party based votes so everybody would go in on Election Day every four years set aside the the the the off presidential years you wouldn't vote for president directly but you'd cast two ballots in the House of Representatives one would be just like you do now right you'd vote for the Democrat or the Republican likely to be two parties because it's geographically defined but then you're actually going to vote by party your second ballot is going to be by party and so what you're signaling there is I want the Democrat to run the Coalition or at least give him a shot at running the Coalition but I wanted to move in a progressive direction or conversely I wanted to work with the mainstream Republicans or I want the Republicans to begin the negotiation process but I don't want them to join with Maga I want them to join with Centrist Democrats right you you know I you can see that this system in which you cast two ballads empowers voters by letting them Express their sincerely held views on policy on identity on culture and send a real me meaningful signal about what they want the coalition to look like and those parties suddenly third parties fourth parties fifth parties they're no longer spoilers they're no longer a threat because the nice thing about Coalition governances for those parties to be effective they're going to negotiate I'll join the government but here's what I'm going to demand you're going to have to go with this policy that my base my constituency cares about you're going to have to give me the appoint appointment to this cabinet position that my constituency cares about you might even negotiate a seat on the Supreme Court right and so when you vote for a third party those parties reward you to the extent they do their job well by giving you something in exchange for your support and so they deliver something meaningful and you as a voter are motivated to vote for third parties when those third parties capture what it is you truly value as a voter in terms of your ideology and your policy preferences and it turns out if we look at Democratic systems that include proportional representation as at least a significant part of their governing structure in Coalition governance voters are happier the government the governments are more responsive people turn out in higher numbers and they feel more connected they wouldn't trade their system for ours H okay pick one or two examples from your half dozen around the world where this is something like this is being done and how it works yeah so the best example is Germany so Germany of course has a horribly tragic history that we're all familiar with the showa right the Holocaust the wear Republic and the rise of Nazi Germany so the problem politically if we look at this from a structural standpoint that Adolf Hitler exploited was a fragmented hyper part sort of too many parties in the system system he was able to get a plurality which means the most seats short of a majority and he was able to roll over other smaller parties and eventually get acquiescence by the president who wasn't really the head of the government to to allow him to take over and become um you know what he what he tragically ultimately became so so Germany's coming at it from the opposite side of where we're coming at they had too many parties too much fragmentation and they had a fascist party taking control we have two parties and as I said before the twin threat to democracy is too few parties or too many parties you want the sweet spot so they came up with a brilliant scheme for postor War II Germany and it's called mix member proportionality and a survey of political scientists recognized this as really the best way to do democracy and it has been benignly adapted by quite a number of countries globally but let's talk about Germany so the way it works in Germany the lower chamber is called the bundestag that's the equivalent of Our House of Representatives there's an upper chamber called the bundus rat that's the equivalent of the Senate so what happens is you as a voter vote for a District representative they call it a constituency seat same thing right representing a geographical constituency same idea as a district seat but you also vote for a party so you cast two ballots in the bundestag now if a party captures a majority of bundestag seats which virtually never happens it would run the government on its own but as as typically happens one party gets more seats than others but not enough to form the government it's going to form a government with another party or maybe more than one party and form a coalition government so that's an example that works pretty well there are quirks in the German system that my proposal avoids and it gets a little bit mathy I don't think we need to get into the weeds too deeply but part of the problem is that the German Supreme Court insisted on perfect party proportionality the consequence of which is that the size of the bundestag has been increased so you have an inflated bundestag to meet the mathematical problem problems of perfect party proportionality and a problem that we could talk about if it interests you called negative weighted voting just an anomaly in voting I've avoided those problems Our House of Representatives in my proposal would be doubled from 435 to 870 but it would be stable at that size we wouldn't have perfect party proportionality because our states are of different sizes and fractions don't always work out the same way we only need good enough proportionality to break the two party um the the two-party problem embedded in our democracy to make sure that no single party will typically capture a majority of seats so that we move from this hypar and two-party system to multi-party governance so the German system is is is a nice example they're dealing with another problem and they've just modified their system but we always have to understand that each country faces its own its own problems but this system could be benignly adapted here because we could simply add another cohort of Representatives based on those party ballots with each State's delegation we take the party votes and use them to make sure that we get good enough proportionality and we will end up with a multi-party house that is going to create um a coalition government the way I've structured it up to five parties can negotiate forming a majority Coalition until a majority Coalition forms and I've got a back stop there too um so we end up with stability unlike a lot of parliamentary systems where you can have election after election after election and you don't end up with a coalition my system recognizes the importance of the United States being able to predictably know it as a government we are the biggest superpower in the world we have to be able to commit ourselves so I keep presidential terms I I I I keep the fouryear uh choice of President the two-term limit it really is the least radical means of radically repairing our broken democracy I'm not upending unnecessarily our constitutional system I'm adapting A system that has been regarded widely by political scientists as the best and I'm looking to make parliamentary America emphasis on America right so that it really is a system that would work for us just be clear you'd keep the 100 Senators yes indeed I would and I talk about that so there's a couple of points to make there I would love the Senate to be a portioned I would love alternatively to have the Senate play a less significant policymaking role role as occurs in many countries throughout the world where the lower chamber is the principal driver of policy the upper chamber is more limited to things like appointments and advice and consent and these sorts of things however the Constitution has an impediment to taking that on and that is that the amending cause in the Constitution actually says the one thing you can't amend is apportionment in the Senate now that doesn't really mean that what it means is that you need two amendments to a portion the Senate you have to amend the amending Clause to make it so you can am amend the Senate so you need you need two amendments right okay my point is that as the United States becomes a multi-party system what we'll see is of course two parties will dominate in these geographical races but it doesn't mean we'll see the same two parties in every region of the country and there's actually precedent for that even in the US the farmers party in Minnesota and some other states right so what we may end up seeing in the Senate actually is a gradual emergence toward a multi-party system because although individual states will have two dominant parties they won't have the same two parties in every state so it may be the case that over time the Senate becomes a multi-party system and I believe that once we become a more functional government which I'm convinced the system will create we can have conversations about other improvements to our system that might be more fair right but I don't want to take on things that aren't essential to fixing the problem we have that's the least radical part right I have a wish list of other things I'd like to do I talk about it in the book here are some other things I'd love to see reform but the goal of the book is to get us to the point where we are a profoundly functional democracy and then there are other things we can talk about doing but we have to be surgical we have to be willing to say the goal here isn't to punish members of Congress who we are disappointed in it's actually to bring them along let them be the heroes of democracy let them be the folks who actually created a transformation in our democracy to a truly thriving multi-party democracy I'll give them all the credit in the world I don't care who gets credit for this I just want to create a thriving democracy so that my children in future Generations get to live in the United States that would like for them I will add this the dedication of my book is really short to my children and yours and I mean it right right okay what's the magic number four parties five is there too many to six or seven would be too much 4 to eight six to seven the sweet six to seven is the sweet okay just to use current examples maybe we'd have mega and then the old GOP people like Mitt Romney uh and then on the left you have the the Hillary Bernie kind of Centrist just to the left old school liberals then you got the progressives the squad and so on then maybe you have the RFK JS uh and you know maybe the Libertarians maybe there's five or six in there beautiful you you got it exactly as I would have said it I might have pushed Bernie over with the progress that's the only disagreement I might have had with you because I do think that he's kind of the grandfather of the progressives but um but other than that I'm with you in other words I think we naturally have roughly five to six parties we could quibble about whether there's a crossover party whether you know whether RFK really has a movement um I'm not sure that he does right there might be a green party there might be space for that it might even attract some conventional conservatives we could we could right we can quibble about the sixth party it doesn't matter matter but I think we naturally agree that the that the Republican party today is a blend of traditional GOP plus Maga or America First the Democratic party is kind of an unhappy marriage between Center you know sort of Centrist Democrats and progressives there might be space for a Libertarian or green party so so so I you know in our system what we're missing is a mechanism by which to allow those parties to break down that way and to actually flourish and and and what and I think that the big mistake that reformers are making is imagining we can just admonish people to support third parties it is our institutional structures that inhibit the creation of third parties because going back to this very simplistic notion of a single political line the one thing we can say is each side knows it has to fracture the opposition and stay United and that gives rise to two parties and those two parties throughout our history have done everything they could to make it difficult for third parties to emerge and Thrive and the only way you can have meaningful third parties is through structural reform and we have to be willing to confront that reality we can't Tinker at the edges we can't say oh let's have somebody run we can't have the forward party we can't have slogan aing like forward not right not left that doesn't create a third party the problem is embedded in the structures of our constitution we have to change our institutions to achieve meaningful third parties we can do it but we can't do it by pretending that there's an easier Band-Aid that solves the problem okay so the forward party Andrew Yang rank Choice voting uh you would see this is just a bandid that's not going to really fix the problem in some respects worse than a Band-Aid for rank Choice voting if you think about rank choice voting or multi-member districts those are unemployment acts for members of Congress you are literally asking members of Congress to support a proposal the very purpose of which upon implementation is to replace them with centrists it's a little bit hard to imagine now now of course we could have a convention called by States it's never happened before but it could happen and I argue that if we actually do have a convention called by States my proposal becomes even more attractive because it becomes the pressure release valve that lets Congress say okay you're proposing all these things but we've got a set of fixes that we think fix the problem we've got credibility because all amendments have come from Congress before which is true right they've all come from Congress they've never come from a Convention of states and they will fix the problem right so so I so I so I really believe that this that this is an enactable set of proposals whereas things like term limits rank Choice voting multi-member districts all of which are designed to make it easier to elect people who will replace the incumbents it's pretty hard to get the incumbents behind that campaign right how do you incentivize people to go along with your program okay let's just think about this out loud Senators won't mind because they still get the they still get their two per state would congressmen feel like my vote has now been watered down 50% because there's now twice as many of me from representing my state and therefore I don't want to do this well so so you will have more Senators you have two means of representation but you're gaining the ability to choose the president and you're allowing people who are in the house to head up additional parties you don't have to go you don't have to go along with Donald Trump if you're a conservative to actually gain power right you're you're not forced into a sort of a two-party system where you're limited to just two teams to choose from so you're giving more power and also members of state general assemblies suddenly you've got list systems where people who are in state general assemblies have a pathway to get from the state capital to Capitol Hill without necessarily having to play the typical every two-year fundraising game they're going to be able to demonstrate an ability to put together Coalition governments they're going to be able to demonstrate a skill set that will benefit the state and people who are good at District retail politics have added right you you you get to keep your district and so I think that these proposals number one they are empowering not disempowering of the most significant political actors who matter both at the state and at the federal level number two it gives space for for them to have more choices in terms of how they want to run their professional careers they're not limited to only two Pathways Democratic or Republican and number three it it it makes it so that it's no longer the case that everybody is constantly casting aspersions on the other side think about the different campaign in this system today's campaign is a campaign of denigration right you you're always castigating or insulting the other side imagine a campaign that looks like this I want your vote I know some of you might be more Progressive than me some of you might Embrace more conservative policies than me but this is who I am and I can work with people who don't think exactly the way I do I can work with people who don't think exactly the way you do I can put together a team you're not going to agree with everything but I think you're going to agree with the values that we share we're committed to good governance we're committed to delivering just imagine a campaign like that yeah it's hard to imagine now yeah but that's the way you would have to campaign yeah in order to form a successful Coalition it's not a fantasy the mitt robney and the Liz chenies would would would not just be denounced by the megas they' just go off and form their own party and the mega people would have to deal with them and on the absolutely and more power to them and they may and they may end up forming a grand Coalition with the Centrist Democrats from whom the progress spin-off to form their own party and frankly great that that's not a permanent Coalition but it could be a wonderful transitional Coalition yeah in Germany um the what's the party afd is that the one that's kind of part yeah yeah uh but with their system set up the way they are could they never pull off a Hitler like takeover so look you know it you never want to say never you never want to say it's impossible but what you do want say or what you want to achieve is making it more difficult you want to make it as difficult as it can be so although it is true that the afd is a party with some influence it has remained a minority party the real threat of an afd is in a two-party system the problem is you can't afford to give up any of your members so you have to acques to afd or you have to acques to Maga even if you wouldn't have ever thought you'd agree with the points that are being being raised by extremist members of your party I don't mean to equate Maga with afd I'm I I'm only using it for analytical purposes I'm not saying everybody I'm I'm I'm really not saying that but my point is that in a two-party system the risk is an extremist faction can take over the party and then win the general election in a part in a system with too many parties that party could gain a plurality and then begin rolling over other parties and a system with that sweet spot of four to eight parties you make it structurally more difficult for that party to do it because other parties have competition they can form coalitions with others they are not limited to you and so the premise of all of this is institutions matter we have to make our institutions serve our people right now they don't there's no institution that's going to be an absolute foolproof guarantee against problematic results but that doesn't mean we should give up the fight for better institutions that minimize the likelihood of the worst results right now we don't have that but we can we can achieve a set of better institutions that dramatically reduce the likelihood of the most problematic results I have an interesting background I spent the first part of my career at George Mason law school second part of my career at the University of Maryland car School of Law two very different places right I know a lot of conservatives know a lot of liberals no a lot of progressives no Centrist Republicans right so so yeah we all we we all I mean I like to think we all have friends who don't agree with us you know don't necessarily embrace our personal political views that's the way it should be the problem is it's becoming increasingly difficult yeah as a result of the hyper fractionalization and the hyper partisanship in our society yeah yeah I mean my Republican friends feel they don't like Trump feel like we have to vote for him and same thing on the left most of my liberal friends my age they don't like the far-left progressive uh movement but you know it's like but I have to vote uh Democrat that's my my team so much there's only two choices yeah there's only two choices yeah my wife's from Germany so she's always telling me about the coalitions and Angela Merkel has to do this and that because she doesn't have a a plur majority anyway so yeah I I really like this this this model A Lot how do you how do you get started short of everybody in Congress reads your book and goes hey this is a great idea let's do this how do you start so so so honestly this conversation and others that I'm doing right I mean I'll I'll literally be traveling around the country um a bit I've got I've got a plan trip to La I've got one that's coming up in in in in Seattle I'll be giving talks here on the on the east coast and hopefully many more to be scheduled some virtual like this some live so so the first step is to get people to think differently and and and and really the principle reason I wrote this book was I believe very much in the proposals I think this is achievable but I think the first step is we have to get people to reframe their understanding of how our system works we have to get past this notion of American exceptionalism right that's the first step people have to recognize that we may have thrived for a quarter of a millennium not because of our unique constitutional design but in spite of it um and and and there are very clear reasons why we might have survived in spite of it we've been geographically isolated from foreign military threats we've had a constant influx of highly motivated in immigrants we had the capacity for westward expansion albe it a tremendous pain and cost to Native Americans and we had the original sin of the tragedy of bringing enslaved persons to the uni you know to before the United States and maintaining him here in a state of abject Terror it may be that those are the reasons we survived not because of what a group of people who met in Philadelphia a quarter of a millennium ago came up with it might be in spite of some of the things they came up with and I me to suggest that everything that they did um was necessarily mistaken but they did make mistakes and we have to be open as you said to the idea that these were people they're not gods and they didn't have a lot of the perspective we have today we know more about the business of democracy today we have other models we can look at and so part of it is educ a and yeah part of that education over time will include government officials members of Congress I think it's vitally important that they be included in the conversation because there is this visceral tendency on both sides to want to claim that the framers had it right the framers were brilliant the framers made no mistakes we have to get past American exceptionalism we have to be willing to learn from the experience of others we have to be willing to imagine as is true there are better ways to do democracy so in terms of how to get this done you know look I'm going to be giving talks I think this is the most important thing I've done in my career and I've been in this career for a pretty long time right I've been teaching for since 1992 I'm 63 years old I am happy to do this for as long as I'm able to be doing what I do for a living um and I and I will and I and I and I really mean it I will talk to people um I will talk to them regardless of their political beliefs I think everybody can gain from this in the sense that they can finally say I'm going to actually vote for somebody who cares about me and whose values I share right um why is it that and and maybe I just don't know enough history about this but it seems to me like in the old days you know the convention is where it's all decided these you know behind behind closed doors with the cigar smoking guys and we're going to decide who our candidate is and you know they on the left they go okay Joe thank you for your service uh you got us through the last four years but you know it's time for you to retire we got our new guy and that's what we're going to go with I don't think that can happen why or on the other side the same thing well it it's it's funny there there was an oped it might have been Ros who thought but but I'm not sure in the New York Times sort of predicting what you just said saying that Biden's going to stay in until the convention and then in the convention he's going to make plain that he's stepping aside and then he's going to have the smoke filed rooms right I'm married to an oncologist so I have to get rid of the cigar metaphor but figuratively speaking right um the Smoke Filled rooms um choose a successor you know and it's an interesting it's an interesting idea the problem I have with it is that it plays into all of the tropes about a ISM I mean imagine Trump against whoever the Dems pick in that scenario right I mean all the people who had buy into this notion that there were Elites pulling the strings of our democracy that plays right into it you're right historically it was much more of a deliberative process that's what the framers had in mind and it got superseded by the entrenchment of the two- party system it's part of the tension between what the framers thought they were doing and what they actually did that we you know so now I mean really what's the Electoral College it's like an algorithm right no one's attending no one's paying tuition it's an algorithm we you know we we the night of the election we see what the results of the Electoral College are it's just a it's just a formula that's all it is right and it's a stupid formula it's like it's it's a formula that nobody you know at the front end thinking how would I construct a system here's a way to do it I don't think anybody on the planet would say this is the way to democracy but that's all it is it's it's just an algorithm and it happens to have the one benign feature of limiting contested elections to the only places they matter so we get to cabin challenges as compared to what we' have if we replaced it with a national popular vote um so yeah you're right I mean we we we have kind of morphed into a system that just further deeply entrenches the two-party scheme that really has its foundations in the structure as opposed to the writings of The Federalist Papers the structure of the Constitution itself yeah well as a voter and a concerned uh citizen I I like your system in the sense that I I would like to I'm not going to vote for RFK J for example he's you know he's an extreme conspiracist and a lot of anti-science stuff on his vaccines and absolutely Pharmacy but there are some things he says that are you know the the militarism and the you know endless dollars poured into the military and the regulatory capture by uh pharmaceutical companies of the regulatory State you know we got to keep keep on top of that yeah yeah so I wish I had some of his him and some of his people in there just a little bit you know to kind of make that point and then you know whoever on the left and whoever else on the right maybe the Libertarians are in there and the green party I'm concerned about the environment yeah let them have a voice we all have to be we be how can we not be concerned about the environment we look at the models from 10 15 years ago and it turns out that they were understating the the threat that we're experiencing globally but if you have a green party it's like well you know that I don't want the green party to be completely in charge I mean that's not you know that's I have other concerns too so yeah five or six parties would be great yeah all right Max I hope you do it well thank you Michael you have my you have my vote well it's I I I greatly appreciate that and and and and it's you know I'm I'm in this for the long run it really has been a pleasure to talk to you good all right

Channel: Skeptic

Views: 3,613

Keywords: Michael Shermer, Skeptic, democracy, politics, Science Salon, The Michael Shermer Show, U.S. Constitution, Maxwell Stearns

Id: 89iMM4P1-bw

Length: 67min 4sec (4024 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 26 2024